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  3. Many thoughtful parents want to shield their children from feelings of guilt

Many thoughtful parents want to shield their children from feelings of guilt

游客2024-11-18  2
问题     Many thoughtful parents want to shield their children from feelings of guilt or shame in much the same way that they want to spare them from fear. Guilt and shame as methods of discipline are to be eschewed along with raised hands and leather straps. Fear, guilt and shame as methods of moral instruction are seen as failures in decent parenting. Parents want their children to be happy and how can you feel happy when you are feeling guilty, fearful or ashamed? If we were really convinced that using fear, guilt or shame as methods of discipline worked, though, we might be more ready to use them as techniques. But we aren’t convinced that this is the case. We won’t have more socially responsible people if fear, guilt and shame are part of their disciplinary diet as children. Instead, we will simply have unhappy people. Responsible behavior has nothing to do with the traditional methods of raising moral children.
    This doesn’t mean that guilt isn’t an important feeling. It is. Guilt helps keep people on the right moral track. But guilt is a derivative emotion, one that follows from having violated an internalized moral standard. This is far different than making someone feel guilty in order to create the standard in the first instance.
    My wife once edited a magazine about hunger. A view held by many associated with the sponsoring organization claimed: You can’t get people to give money to starving children by making them feel guilty. So the magazine didn’t show pictures of starving children, children with doleful eyes. Instead, there were photos of women in the fields, portraits of peasant farmers and pictures of political organizers. But the publishers weren’t completely right about believing that guilt-inducing pictures don’t lead to moral action. In fact, it was the graphic pictures of starving children in Somalia that called the world’s attention to the dire situation there. The power of television is that it does bring images of others’ tragedies directly into our home. No rational analysis can do the same. When we are moved to pity, we should also be moved to action.
    If we don’t do anything, then we feel guilty. We become part of the problem we see and feel guilty for letting bad things happen to people. How can I, good person that I am, let this continue? What have pricked the conscience here are guilty feelings.
    Guilty feelings arise when we have violated a moral norm that we accept as valid. A person who feels guilty, notes philosopher Herbert Morris, is one who has internalized norms and, as such, is committed to avoiding wrong. The mere fact that the wrong is believed to have occurred, regardless of who bears responsibility for it, naturally causes distress. When we are attached to a person, injury to that person causes us pain regardless of who or what has occasioned the injury. We needn’t believe that we had control over hurting (or not helping) another person in order to feel guilty.
    Psychologists Nico Frijda and Batja Mesquita of the University of Amsterdam find that people feel guilty about having harmed someone even when it was accidental. Nearly half the people they interviewed felt guilty for having caused unintended harm, such as hurting one’s mother when leaving home to marry.
    Unintentional harm may lead to as strong guilty feelings as intentional harm. In other words, being careless is as much a source of guilt as intentional harm. We say, If only I had been more careful, If only I had paid more attention, If only I were a better driver. The fact that a court may not even bring charges against you in the first place may help to assuage some of the pain but it doesn’t remove all the feelings of guilt.
    The feeling is useful in so far as it makes us more cautious, makes us better drivers or moves us to socially responsible action. The sociopath never experiences such feelings and therefore poses a danger to society; the neurotic experiences so much of it that he can’t function normally in society.
    Feeling guilty for harm you have caused when you aren’t responsible is possible because there is a more generalized readiness to accept responsibility for your actions. Guilt arises when we think we have had choices and then have made the wrong moral choice. Guilt and responsibility appear to go together. If we do harm and feel no guilty, then we don’t believe we are responsible for what we’ve done. This means that we see ourselves as victims—of circumstances, of coercion, of ignorance and so forth.
    Remember that people who think of themselves as victims do so because they believe they have no control over events in their lives. They don’t feel responsible and therefore don’t feel guilty either. Several tactics can be used in disavowing responsibility: following the crowd, it is someone else’s problem, it was done under coercion.
    None of us is perfect and that we live in an imperfect world. This means that we can’t avoid hurting others. If we accept this, then we have to accept guilty feelings as a consequence of being moral people.  [br] Which of the following statements about guilt might the writer agree with?
选项 A、Guilt is used as a method to discipline children.
B、To set up a moral standard, you should feel guilty.
C、Guilt is a feeling that comes with breaking some moral standard.
D、The feeling of guilt often goes together with shame and fear.
答案 C
解析 细节题。第二段第四句指出，内疚是一种后天才有的情感，是违背了内在道德标准后而衍生出来的一种感觉。故[C]为答案。首段第五、六句指出，如果我们真的坚信用恐惧、内疚和羞耻进行教育行之有效的话，我们或许更乐意把它们当作教育孩子的方法和手段。但我们不相信这真的会有效。故排除[A]；首段第三句指出，人们认为使用恐惧、内疚和羞耻感的方法培养孩子的道德观不是一种良好的教育方法。故排除[B]；文中虽然提到了内疚、羞耻和恐惧，但没有提及三种情感相伴相生，故排除[D]。
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